Coping Wood

Return the beadboard installation for this weekend with a few difficult areas to work around. First up is more cutting out around an outlet which also butts up against the medicine cabinet cutout. Most of this work is just measuring out the distance of the GFCI outlet spacing on the boards and cutting out the square cuts for that. We decide to have the medicine cabinet sit on top of the beadboard instead of cutting around it. I think this makes for a cleaner look even if the medicine cabinet is extended from the wall for about a 1/2 inch sitting on the beadboard. The only issue is that we’ll need to provide some shims around the top and sides of the medicine cabinet to make sure the medicine cabinet lays flat instead of angled when pushed into the cutout.

We were going to try cutting around the medincne cabinet but decided ot just lay on top of the beadboard.

After the outlet, the trickier part is the pipes for the sink. For these we have 2 supply lines and a drain pipe. We were thinking that we’d need to split the board into 2 pieces to go above and below the pipe but with some testing we’re able to get 1 board in over the pipe by cutting holes. For this we again measure from the position of the pipe. For the small pipes I use a hole saw attachment to cut a perfect circle.

Hole saw with cracked finish.

We test on some scrap boards and one thing I quickly find out is that pushing the hole saw through the board causes the board to split/crack when breaking through the other side. We fix this by going about 50% through one side and then flipping over and cutting through the other side. This helps eliminate \splitting the board when breaking through the other side of the board. For the drain pipe, that doesn’t fit neatly on 1 board so we need to trace curves on two different boards to fit them around the pipe. Those curves are cut with a jigsaw because there’s not enough wood to use a hole saw on these cuts.

Wood cuts around the pipes.

With the beadboard finished, the next step is finishing off the chair rail and baseboards. I already have most of the chair rail installed. The last pieces are inside corners which I’m going to try and cope the wood for the joints. I’ve never coped before so I start testing on some scraps. I do a 45 degree cut with a miter saw and then try to cut away the exposed profile to cope the chair rail.

Cutting a 45 degree angle to expose the chair rail profile. I’m using a piece of beadboard to make the chair rail lay flat in the miter box.

The coping is really tricky with the wood splitting sometimes when removing parts of the profile that are delicate. I’m able to get about 50% of the profile laying flat, but find the bottom portion of the profile isn’t close to matching up. I try the approach of wrapping sandpaper around the molding profile and using that to sand the coped piece to fit better. This works OK, but is very slow going.

Coping with files, saws and sandpaper.

With the coping being a timesink, I move over to install some baseboard. I start with the easy parts and get those installed. Eventually I’ll have 2 inside corners and the vent pipe to also deal with but I get the parts that don’t require any special cuts.

Easy section of baseboard install.

Last task before heading out is installing the tub feet back on the tub. Pretty soon we’ll flip this back over for returning to the bathroom once the floors are all cleaned and the molding installed.